The
minute division of labour in a market economy takes away our competencies and
sells them back to us.

(Jeremy Seabrook, The Guardian, 04 August 2009)

The division of labour in rich societies is so minute and
particular that an individual's specialised knowledge is often sealed off from
that of other people. It isn't my field. I'm not an expert. I didn't cover that
period. That isn't my responsibility. It's not my department. I know nothing
about that. These are some of the phrases with which people explain a narrowing
apprehension of the world.

As a consequence many basic common human competences lapse.
A concentration on the specific is accompanied by the loss of other forms of
knowing, which come to appear archaic in the modern world.

Abandoning basic
skills may seem like liberation, especially at first – forgetting how to grow,
or even to prepare, our own food, how to make the simplest garments, how to
provide ourselves with shelter: to pass over such tasks to others is to set
aside a great burden.

But once lost, these simple accomplishments become
irrecoverable; and other, precious human powers also fall into decay as they
become someone else's labour: knowing what to do in times of want, sickness and
death, how to behave in the presence of suffering; but also how to celebrate
our own lives through our own stories, songs and poetry – all this is forfeit in
the interests of an ever more elaborate partitioning of social function.

This gives a clue to why there is much debate over whether a
new generation is becoming more clever or less instructed than those that went
before. On the one hand, there is dumbing down, simplifying, losing abilities
formerly taken for granted, being cut off from knowledge of history and
literature; on the other, improving examination results, greater
"awareness", different forms of consciousness, the acquisition of new
skills – the hand-eye co-ordination of the computer game, the dexterity and
sharpness of youth. The argument is inconclusive. Perhaps in what looks like a
contradiction, both sides contain a measure of truth; and young people can
become simultaneously more and less capable.

The only thing you need to know in "advanced" or
"developed" societies in the throes of perpetual reform and
modernisation is how to get, acquire, earn or make money, because with that you
can get everything. The range of verbs is significant, for it covers both licit
and forbidden methods of coming by it. Since the great majority of us rely on a
wage or salary to maximise income, we have to know a good deal about something.
But in acquiring and intensifying the particular knowledge, the more likely it
becomes that mastery of other capabilities will sink into oblivion. The
complexity of the division of labour is accompanied by a reduction in areas of
active competence.

This is how money both empowers and depowers: it permits us
to buy in all that is necessary for a full and creative life; but it also
divorces us increasingly from what Ivan Illich called "our native
capacities for healing, consoling, moving, learning, building our houses and
burying our dead"; the work of those who now service our needs were once
common property, but are now jealously guarded professional qualifications. In
this way, ignorance co-exists with highly specialised knowledges. In a sense,
we are all existential sub-contractors, like the character in Villiers de
l'Isle Adam's drama, Axel, who said "as for living, our servants will do
that for us".

This social and economic mechanism is itself the generator
of the real dependency culture. It is fragile and easily disrupted: all it
takes to throw it into disorder is a strike of deliveries to supermarkets, an
interruption to the power system, a natural calamity that blocks the delicate
yet cumbersome process by which our daily bread comes to us. The image of empty
supermarket shelves, a breakdown in the petrol supply, a blank TV screen are
frightening reminders of our dependency on a system that takes from us as much
as, or more than, it yields, but which must be kept going at any cost.

This subjection is the opposite of the freedoms of which our
society is supposed to be the supreme embodiment. The choice, democracy and
liberty we enjoy are highly conditional upon others; yet these easily vanish,
since our social and economic purpose appears detached from theirs – our own
needs are foregrounded, our own indispensability in the labour structure, and
above all, that most private of all our relationships (no longer love or even
sex) but the secret, sacred communion that subsists between ourselves and our
money.

Outside our own sphere of knowledge, we are a nation of
gilded incompetents; since in the unfamiliar world of other people's expertise,
we grope in ignorance and helplessness.

This is what the apparently benign phenomenon of "the
market economy" actually means. For its growth and expansion, it must
appropriate more areas of human proficiency, reshape them and sell them back.
It involves a relentless mining, not so much of human needs as of human
competences. It robs us of abilities and markets the results of that larceny in
a new shape.

If we are constantly fascinated by whatever novelties appear on
sale in the showcases of the world, this is because, more often than not, they
embody the predations of lightning raids on our internal resources; and indeed,
parallel the pillage of their material counterparts. Shopping, in this context,
becomes not so much addiction or therapy as a desperate effort to recuperate
some of the lost capacities and aptitudes through the conjuring power of money.

It is a truism that we now occupy a "knowledge
economy". This is an ambiguous terms, for it suggests also an economy of
knowledge, that sparingness that makes it a scarce commodity; and one for which
we pay dearly and doubly, since not only is it removed from our hands, heads
and hearts, but also can only be regained by paying for it.

It is not, as some
moralists have claimed, that "artificial wants" or unnecessary needs
are created by consumerism and the expanding market; it is, rather, that
something vital is always being taken away, which can never be compensated
adequately by the buyback scheme that is global retailing, since it lies,
inert, captured and stored in the growing array of things set before us. If
they beguile and enchant, this is because they belonged to us in the first
place.

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About Me

Delhi-based journalist, having worked for a business magazine and a news agency.
Also worked as a researcher on local democracy and right to information for an NGO.
Having left my latest employment at a magazine on governance, where I contributed to ideation and wrote on public policy from the perspective of common citizens, in September 2010, I am currently engaged in freelancing.
At the NGO, I participated in a rare experiment in bringing face to face the people and their representatives and officials in the municipal bodies. At the business magazine, I wrote on finance, economy, business, education, healthcare, etc. At the news agency, my longest employer so far, I worked on the business and economy desk, but also did some news reporting and writing. I believe we Indians are going through a very slow but sure democratic awakening, which is due to greater flow of information. We must sustain this process of awakening and help each other out of ignorance. This ignorance enslaves us to the elite that currently handles the levers of power.